Bedřich Bárta

“We started such a group, its name was Jihlavar, and we wanted to privatise [i. e. buy from the state] both the brewery and the lemonade factory. But there were more groups which wanted… We were, like, employees of the brewery and friends, people who could help in some way with the sale or otherwise. There were more of those groups, four or five. And we went to the ministries and such to do all the lobbing. I went to see Minister [of agriculture] Lux twice to explain why we can do it and how we would manage the brewery. However, as there were more of those groups, then, later, when Václav Klaus was the Prime Minister, at that time when he saw… Everyone was lobbing. He [the Prime Minister] later decided somehow that no, not this way, that it would go through the voucher privatisation, the Jihlava brewery. At that time, the brewery manager, Mr. Bouda and other businessmen started going to Zwettl to Austria, to the brewery to see Mr. Schwarz who then made plans with another businessman to buy out the voucher books, I don’t remember what price they offered, and then, based on the vouchers, the Schwarzes bought it in the voucher privatisation, the brewery.“

“[Our family] moved out of the distillery and into that mill in Nohavice. That’s where my younger sister lived, she married there. And they raised the mill building, which looked like that, by one floor when they got married. They wanted to have a flat there. They did have some sort of building permit. Out of the scope of the permit, they built an alcove in the wall and put a statuette of Virgin Mary there. It caused a bad uproar. That it was not permitted and it has to be removed. And they said that they were not going to remove anything because at that time, there was a dean, one Mr. Zeman, in Polná, he was such a rare charater, during the First Republic, he had moved to Belgium. He was a teacher. Then he returned to Czechoslovakia and he did not like the human toiling. He joined the seminary and studied to be a priest. In 1948, he was to be elected as a bishop in Hradec Králové, even. But then they put him behind the bars and he was in Želiv [where many priests and clerics were in internment]. Then he was in Polná and sister used to visit him and ask for advice. He told her: ‚Liduška, I wouldn‘t put Virgin Mary there.‘ Then there was the court hearing. If they got any money – state support for the construction – they had to return it all. And they were sentenced to a fine and their wages were seized. She told me that once, her husband brought only ten crowns in wages.“